246 replies
1d18h
My understanding is this allergen over-labeling was inspired by the FDA in the first place. https://www.fastcompany.com/90830854/sesame-seed-allergen-fd...
From the linked article (from Jan 2023):
But sesame does differ in one distinct way from eggs, peanuts, shellfish, milk, and soy: The seeds are teeny tiny and hard to keep track of. This means they’re prone to “cross-contamination,” in food-allergy terms. If you operate a bakery that makes sesame bagels, the odds are decent that rogue seeds will end up in your other products, too. Bad news for people with severe sesame allergies. But it’s also expensive and frustrating for food manufacturers to ensure the seeds are kept away from other foods, if they’re on the FDA’s major allergens list.
Advocates have therefore been warning since December that the FASTER Act is poised to have a counter effect. Rather than minimize cross-contamination, as they argue the law requires, many big food brands have opted to add sesame to their bread products, then simply declare it as an ingredient. They are intentionally adding sesame flour to “avoid complying with the spirit and intent of the FASTER Act,” FARE tells Fast Company. That is cheaper than certifying that their facilities are 100% sesame-free.
Doesn’t this open up the market for a newcomer to make verified sesame-free bread?
No. That market is too small to target. Overregulation is affecting consumer choices.
It’s over regulation to everyone who doesn’t have sesame allergies.
It’s lifesaving to those that do.
Somehow bakeries in Switzerland are doing just fine with sesame being a declared allergen and keeping them separate but American ones just can’t be bothered to handle a life threatening ingredient thoroughly carefully.
well, until now, bimbo's breads were sesame-free, and now they'll presumably have sesame in them. so people in the usa with sesame allergies will have to cook their own bread at home now, unless they're lucky enough to have access to a small artisanal bakery
"will have to cook their own bread at home now"
Serious question as a non native english speaker, is this a correct way of saying it?
I think bread is usually baked in an oven ..
Don’t know the actual stats but (UK here) lots of people who make bread at home use a dedicated bread machine
It is still an small oven, not a cooking pot ..
(some bread you can also make in a pan, but you cannot cook bread in my understanding)
What's the difference between baking and cooking in your understanding? You can make bread in a rice cooker, which nobody has ever called a "rice baker".
edit: and a rice cooker is definitely not a small oven.
Cooking involves boiling. Liquids bubbling.
Baking is more of a evaporation.
And the german definition of cooking in the narrow sense is defined like this, but in a broader sense apparently usable for everything with preparing meals.
And I never used a rice cooker, so no idea how to classify that ..
If cooking involves boiling, what are you doing when you put a steak in a hot cast-iron pan?
To the rice cooker point, I'd argue that an oven uses a heating element of some form (electric coils, gas flame, wood fire) to heat the air in a closed environment, and the air transfers heat into an item. In contrast, a rice cooker uses a heating element to directly heat a metal pot, and the metal pot transfers heat into an item. Usually that's going to be a combination of rice and water, but you can e.g. pour pancake batter into the pot and get a large souffle pancake, or put bread dough into the pot and get a loaf of bread. The trick is that the metal pot is much more efficient at transferring heat than the air is, so the rice cooker doesn't need to be at the same temperature as an oven to get the same amount of heat into whatever you're cooking.
Well, technically there is usually bubbling going on, when making a steak, but would you "cook a steak" in english?
In german you would not, one would roast it. (but we have 2 words, roasting "rösten" on the bbq and "braten" would be in a pan. But a "Braten" would be in an oven.)
Kind of not that consistent (like it usually is with natural language).
In general I think those terms were invented, before there were things as a rice cooker.
yes, in english, broiling, grilling, boiling, and baking are kinds of cooking. but 'bake bread' is such a common phrase that 'cook bread' sounds wrong
Cooking is just the application of heat. Baking is the application of dry heat. Baking is a subset of cooking.
In german, the literal translation of cooking is "kochen" and that involves boiling things.
Even if you assume literal translations capture 100% of the details, "kochen" has multiple meanings. One of them is "boiling", another is "cooking" in the general sense of "preparing meals".
Well Wikipedia says there is a narrow definition, that necessarily involves boiling of a liquid. This is the one I always used.
But in the broader sense, it seems to also mean the preparing of meals, but I never encountered it like this.
"Kochen (von lateinisch coquere, „kochen, sieden, reifen“ entlehnt) ist im engeren Sinne das Erhitzen einer Flüssigkeit bis zum und am Siedepunkt, im Weiteren das Garen oder Zubereiten von Lebensmitteln allgemein"
"es kocht" literally means, it is boiling.
Your intuition is right. One would say “will have to bake their own bread at home”.
as a native english speaker, i should have said 'bake their own bread'. it sounds wrong the way i wrote it
"will have to bake their own bread at home now" would be the most correct way of saying it IMO (native American)
Baking bread is more correct, but in my experience "to cook" is generic enough to include baking. If someone has something in the oven and I ask "what are you cooking?", it's not weird.
On the other hand, "cooking bread" is like 2/10 weird.
It's a scale difference. If you're making bread product for a million people you have a massive factory.. And nuts be there
Of course, everything weird and whacky about the US can be explained because it’s just so much bigger - you wouldn’t understand coming from such a tiny country.
The psychology of this comment aside, I don't think any country is so small it can't fit a massive factory in it. Unless you're writing from Vatican City, perhaps?
My point was that all countries have big factories but in the US they are somehow unable to make sure no cross contamination occurs.
It’s just impossible because US scale /s
Are you saying all other countries have zero cross contamination? Can you cite that?
The EU allows cross contamination with the same "may contain" labeling as the US previously did.
It's possible for the US to take note of it because of scale. Doesn't mean it doesn't happen elsewhere.
This exact issue happens in all of the EU as well...
If the regulations had teeth and they weren't allowed to cross contaminate at all, they would build a process that achieves that. Instead they get to put a few labels on there and just accept that they'll lose some customers who are allergic, save some money not building a new process.
you have misunderstood the situation and are suggesting that they enact the regulation that they did actually enact, which is the one that led to this situation
No I didn't, I understand what they have done to skirt the regulations but that is what I mean. It's so easy to get around the regulations, even the new one, they have no teeth. It's clear the companies are acting in bad faith but there is no recourse.
If it weren't for companies acting in bad faith, they wouldn't have to play regulator cat and mouse. If you removed the regulations altogether, your big bakers would be even more lax with allergens and people would get sick.
You aren’t following what is hsppening. The regulation does exactly that, not allow any cross contamination. So they are adding sesame as an ingredient and labeling it as such.
I did understand that. The regulations have no teeth not because they lack penalties, it's because they are ineffectual atat achieving the goal.
It is clear what the outcome of the regulations was supposed to be, products with sesame and products without. But they were poorly planned regulations, and the companies are more than happy to work to the letter of the law.
But maybe this is actually fine, because a company willing to cleanly process allergen free product can capture that market segment.
You need to judge over-regulation as it relates to society as a whole.
What are your thoughts on mandatory wheelchair ramps, fire extinguishers or AED machines? Most of society won't make use of those either.
Are you saying these are examples of over-regulation?
No.
Why are you mentioning them, in that case?
I was asking parent if they thought those items were over-regulation on the basis of the heuristic they provided, without offering any opinion of my own.
You mean this:
That doesn't seem to be a heuristic. E.g. "wheelchair ramps are cheap over the lifetime of a building, so it's obvious we should add them" is a good justification of something not being over-regulation - the "bang for buck" heuristic. But the quoted text doesn't contain a heuristic, so we can't judge anything based on it.
The devil is in the details: whose "bang", whose "buck", and who gets the say when the subjective threshold is met?
Yes. Of course. Although you're talking now about the thing I said, and not the much vaguer thing you thought was detailed enough to believe it excluded wheelchair ramps.
I think like everything, there's good and bad. You didn't translate your previous comment into braille so should I sue you for not catering to the needs of my blind mother?
Having wheelchair ramps at corners, especially new ones, big chains, large institutions, seems great. Forcing the new 1 person boutique down the street to spend $250k+ to add every possible accommodation for language and accessibility, doesn't seem so great.
There are tons of stories of effective extortion over "accessibility" issues
Actually, I know of at least one HN user who will read his comment in braille. GP provided plain text, which is accessible to braille screen readers. And HN is hailed in accessibility circles as an extraordinarily accessible website, so has a disproportionately large accessibility user base.
The point was supposed to be an example of a possible consequence of rules like this. Not a specific example of an actual consequence.
Your comment also suggests the same solution for the bread. If you don't like that there is sesame in it then you should build a robot to remove the sesames. That's the same as saying "I didn't translate my text for you but you can find some other way to get it translated".
Yup. Mandating the inclusion of such features in new construction should be required. Retrofitting is another matter that very well might involve pretty much tearing down structures and most certainly shouldn't be required.
(And note that in some cases "new" construction must work with existing constraints. I'm thinking of a sign I saw in Carlsbad Cavern saying no wheelchairs past this point. The loop that was denied wheelchairs contained a pinch point a wheelchair couldn't go through. Man made the path, nature put the rocks there.)
It's only lifesaving if you want to risk your life. If I have a deadly allergy I'm staying away from certain food groups and am not going to leave my health in the hands of some crappy labels. Have something else other than bread. That's how many people I know with allergies deal with it and it seems the most reasonable approach. In this day there's so many different foods to eat, its easy to have variety without risking it.
It's not like sesame is used only in baked products. Sesame is used in various candies and desserts, as a seasoning for meat, fish, vegetables, even in drinks. I'm not sure if you can eat healthily by excluding all categories of food where sesame might theoretically appear.
You avoid eating things that are risky by preparing them yourself. Which is what I do for my alpha-gal meat allergy.
Risk your life doing what? Eating? All food allergies are deadly. They might not have killed you yet, but every single exposure could be your last. And plenty of people, especially kids, are allergic to 4, 5, 6, 7 major allergens. Maybe you're familiar with adults who have grown out of all but 1 or 2 allergies & know what to avoid. Try feeding a kid who's allergic to soy, wheat, dairy and eggs. Heck, even just soy. Try to put together a week of meals without soy with our modern food supply. Spaghetti:soy. Burgers:soy. Ice cream:soy. Tacos:soy. Sandwiches:soy. The entire soup aisle:soy. What's left, drinking Ensure for every meal? Nope, that has soy _and_ dairy. Robust accurate food labeling is the only way people with several food allergies can eat a remotely normal and balanced diet without playing Russian roulette at every meal.
https://www.coop.ch/en/brands-inspiration/diet/intolerances/...
It sounds like Switzerland does the same thing the US used to do where manufactures have a lazy cop-out? It doesn't sound any stricter at all.
Making sure there is less than 10mg per kg isn't lazy. It's really difficult.
But that’s sulfur.
One gram per kilo for sesame is not hard.
1g per kg is nowhere near enough to protect against bad reactions. Sounds like Switzerland is making a mostly laughable attempt, not doing much.
I have had a rather unpleasant day due to an unknown contaminant in approximately 10mg of material as part of a day's food. Obviously the contaminant was well under 10mg.
A life-threatening allergy is fine and all but will someone please think of the profit margins?!
Almost every physical object you use in your everyday life, including the building you live in and the clothes you wear, was created by someone who cared about the profit margins on that thing, and didn't care about you personally at all. If you want to propose a different system for creating the stuff in the world, it might pay to look at the success rates of other systems people have already tried.
I checked the couple of bread products (from Migros) I have at home, and they all say "may contain sesame"? Maybe that's not a representative sample though.
I'm not sure what the difference is, except the US goes one step further and asks "please don't say it may have an allergen if you don't have to". It results in products definitely having the allergen, but is "may contain" any better than "definitely contains"?
Overregulation + Monopolization is the 1-2 punch in operation here. It's the only reason you'd even think to do something like this.
"Fine. Now _everything_ has Sesame in it. What are you going to do? _Settle_ with us?"
How to fight economies of scale…
Too far the other way will likely lead to a pseudo ban on Sesame seeds. It just wouldn't be worth the risk. Or the cost of it will get pushed on the 99.999% who won't die from a single Sesame seed.
I know there's a lot of things that work like this (handicap ramps for instance) but if you don't draw a line somewhere it does get overly expensive.
There are many small bakeries that offer a variety of options. It seems silly to confidently assert this as you do.
That seems like a sensible point to me. At some level, let the Bimbos of the world have the sesame-agnostic mass market—that only strengthens the case for niche competitors who serve this specific market.
If sesame is in fact poison for a specific subgroup, this shifts the mass market option from “eh it’s probably fine, how often does cross-contamination happen” to “definitely poison for me, I’d better seek an alternative.”
And without overregulation those consumer choices wouldn’t be be easily faked?
Yes it does. It also good for the people with allergies as they can confidently buy that bread.
When FDA declares a new allergen, the top lawyer of the company that has presence from NY to SF seats down with the CEO, they then ask all the manufacturing units to do an audit of the said allergen use and then hire a third party auditor to verify if the allergen is used at all not just at their retail locations but in the entire supply chain. This involves the place where wheat is harvested to the restaurant where the bread is served. For a large company this is a millions of dollars and several quarters of project.
The lawyer and CEO needs to chalk out the plan. If they want to make sure their bread does not contain the said allergen they have to update all their processes right from where they buy their wheat to where they test their bread for the said allergen and retrain their staff, suppliers, QA etc. this adds millions of dollars in additional expenses per year.
Not only all this is complex that makes the bread expensive for EVERYONE, it is also much more prone to error.
It is much easier for your small local company to provide sesame free bread at slightly higher price to those who need it. You wont get it in the middle of death valley but that is fine.
The FDA was expecting that companies spend millions to ensure that the products are free of sesame to help people with allergies, but companies realize that it's easier to just add sesame into their products.
I am not sure the government could do now to help people with sesame allergies. Ban sesame outright from certain products? Mandate that certain companies produce sesame-free products?
Adding an allergen in quantities where it has no meaningful effect is attempting to flout a regulation. It's like bringing money into the country by spitting it among fellow travellers. In a functioning system the authorities would have the power to investigate and use discovery to identify cases where allergens are being added deliberately for no other reason than flouting rules. They should then be able to issue substantive fines to encourage actual compliance.
Its not like adding small amounts of an allergen is a victimless. Lots of people with moderate to serious allergies eat things every day which "may contain" their allergen.
It's not flouting a regulation at all. It's the opposite of flouting. It's complying.
“Malicious compliance” can be read as “flouting” in some cases.
Eg: transaction structuring which is illegal in most places.
People with allergies and various food diggestion problems are not a real market for bread-makers. As in, they make sense for industrial products that do not spoil fast. Means, packaged goods, with lots of additives, tailored to them and a shelf life going into weeks.
Bread is made fresh every day, has a shelf-life of 3 days tops. The logistics are usually measured in hours. The effort to scrub the bakery, transport the gluten-free/nut-free/whatever every day, seperated is thus non specialized and a huge cost in addition to a production of a small facility. So you can get gluten-free bread by a industrial facility speacilized on it, wrapped in plastic. But you can not get it from your local bakery chain.
Add to that the legal damocles swoard hanging over you and mixed artisanal production of small quantities becomes fiscally irresponsible for small buisnesses. In theory you could open a bakery, tailored to a specific allergy set in a dense urban environment. But the rest of the world, a drive away from you, will not have that option.
Sure, although these products usually are A LOT more expensive. Same with gluten-free. That stuff costs 3-10x as much as non-gluten free food.
Case in point: Italy has a wheat-rich cuisine and they give up to 140€ per month to people with Celiac disease to offset the higher costs of gluten-free food:
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2019/03/08/the-rise-and-r...
Eh, this seems like a pretty bullshit argument on the part of manufacturers though. My expectation for a food prep area is that I should be able to safely eat off of any surface. This level of cleanliness should eliminate any contaminants from the environment bigger than airborne dust and given how relatively cheap air filtration equipment is a case could be made there as well. In any case sesame seeds are a hell of alot bigger than dust so there's no great excuse to have them wandering from one product line to another.
There aren’t food prep areas when it comes to manufacturing at this scale. There are silos, storage tanks, essentially duct work to transport ingredients from bulk storage to production, and large-scale machinery which is designed to minimize exposure to the environment and people while in use. That’s putting aside the equipment and facilities used to acquire ingredients or store products after production.
Yes, all of this equipment is also designed to be cleaned and sanitized, but these are large surface areas covering large distances. And we’re talking about one little sesame seed which can’t be easily detected if it somehow makes its way into a product, unlike, say, the metal detectors all finished goods pass through to ensure no metal object found its way into something.
Spending time in facilities like Bimbo operates will disavow someone of the idea that the work a company like that does is akin to what happens in restaurants or catering facilities. These are factories where product assembly happens to involve edible parts.
And looking at the picture of the """bread""" at the start of the article, it shows.
That's not bread, that's an industrial product.
Yes, almost all food these days is an "industrial product" at some point in the pipeline. That's the reality of living in an industrial society and not an agrarian one.
Not at all. Even in this industrial society it is possible to buy raw ingredients and cook yourself and many people do it.
(and as far as I know, many studies imply that is healthier, than heavily processed food, filled with conservatives, additives and whatever)
Those raw ingredients are also "industrial products". Did you think that bag of flour you bought was hand-milled by someone after they hand-picked the wheat? It came from a factory, just like most store-bought bread.
Actually one can buy hand milled flour, but I do not think that makes sense. I am not against big machines (and milling has not been done by hand for centuries). I am against adding all kind of things into my food, that happened to not be proofen cancer inducing yet.
It's almost impossible to find hand-milled flour in a store or online.
You might be confusing "Stone Ground" flour which is ground using a machine [0]
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SolMVg3_Ac
I never tried to buy it myself, but I know I saw it on a organic market (in europe) advertised as such at least once. Basically, a extremely esoteric niché obviously.
Any flour you purchase was processed by Cargill, ADM, or Bunge (or on their behalf). I’m sure there’s artisan grains available for a premium price, but virtually all commodity crops are processed by the big 3 agribusinesses.
It is impossible to avoid industrial food processing unless you grow it yourself.
Yes, and this is what a bakery for basic loaves of bread looks like.[1] And here's one for "artisanal" bread, from the same manufacturer.[2] Notice how similar the processes are. The "artisanal" plant has a few more stations, including a "decoration" station where the sesame seeds, etc. go on top. Artisanal plants tend to be more reconfigurable, the same line can produce a few different products.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvPTD2RF5KM
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWTVkL-f91w
Interesting videos.
Probably the key thing for me is how much of the process in both videos is just exposed to normal air. If sesame is as deadly as some people in this thread are making out and a few grains of sesame dust could kill you, then absolutely the current warning labels seem justified if any loaves are made in a factory that has sesame anywhere. Perhaps there's some in the air, perhaps a worker has some dust on their clothes (which could even affect them travelling to a different factory or even location). What next? Should we demand completely sterile factories and for all the workers to wear full hazmat suits?
It does seem simpler to just allow the labeling to continue with the warning about the possibility, and people with allergies can choose to not eat bread at all, or find a baker who can offer a guaranteed sesame free product. It'll probably cost more to make that guarantee (less demand, limited product range, etc), but if people with allergies want bread so badly that it's worth paying the extra, there will be a sustainable business opportunity. Maybe only artisanal bakers will bother, maybe only those owned by people with the allergies themselves, but if there's an overlap between how much it costs to make that guarantee and how much someone is prepared to pay, somebody will make that business. But if you have an allergy, and you're not prepared to pay for what it costs to protect yourself, why you should expect everyone else to subsidise that?
I say this as someone with allergies myself. I have developed allergies to some common fruits (weirdly, ones I used to love and have eaten for most of my life) that have given me reactions ranging from itchiness to fairly severe throat swellings. I deal with that by not eating those fruits or things containing them. There's plenty of other food in the world that I can have instead.
It's because the sesame labeling law was lobbied by Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE) [0] who are funded by the National Peanut Board, the National Dairy Council, and a number of Soy product manufacturers [1].
Essentially, the sesame law made it mandatory to label for sesame like you would for Dairy, Peanuts, and Soy.
It was a blatant lobbyist attempt that backfired.
[0] - https://www.foodallergy.org/resources/how-fare-advocates-hel...
[1] - https://www.foodallergy.org/corporate-partners
So we're saying what, in an era of atomic scale manufacturing it isn't possible to design a manufacturing line that segregates macro-scale ingredients? I've spent time in pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities. They don't routinely floof active ingredients between capsule lines. Corraling shit the size of a sesame seed is trivial in comparison. So yeah, this is still bullshit.
It’s entirely possible, all you need is a separate factory to make products for 0.3% of the population, in every geographical region you bake bread in.
The reason they aren’t doing it is cost, not practicality.
Aren't the two basically synonymous? Cost is a proxy for the amount of effort put into it.
Possible, yes. Economical, no.
But isn’t that what we read about regarding athletes being acused of cheating because of cross contamination in pharmaceutical manufacturing?
“Generic Pharmaceuticals as a Source of Diuretic Contamination in Athletes Subject to Sport Drug Testing”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8635962/
I can’t wait until bread costs the same as drugs per gram. /s
Thank you for the mental image of a loaf of bread getting busted trying to smuggle a machine part out of the factory.
You joke but product theft is always a major concern.
The food industry has special industrial X-ray machines so that if the hamburger meat grinding machine has a blade snap off, you don't send a customer a hamburger with a blade in it.
How hard would it be to just have a set of sesam free plumbing for specific products? I mean they also manage to keep a separate sewage line, right??
I don't know about Bimbo Breads specifically, but I do know a lot of manufacturing plants will produce several products on the same production line, in batches.
A brewery that produces several types of beer would have separate fermentation tanks for each one - but might only have one bottling/canning line.
I wouldn't be surprised if bread manufacturing was similar - you might produce 8 different types of bread, but only have one bagging machine.
Of course the entire plant would be deep-cleaned once per day. But you'd be switching between products 8 times per day, so there's not time for an hour-long cleaning every time.
Hmm I wonder how good the us legal system is if a person insists they fell ill eating a product without a warning label and it goes to a jury trial?
There will undoubtedly be a focus on ‘whether you can be 100% sure there was no sesame dust in the air’. Without a perfect vacuum clean room (that doesn’t really exist) you can’t be. As in even if you’re really fucking clean your probably losing the case in the American legal system.
Fuck it my bread is made with a sprinkle of sesame flour and is known to contain potential carcinogens identified by the state of California.
As a parent of a child with a severe sesame allergy, you clearly don’t understand food allergies and how severe they can be.
If my child ingests sesame, they go into anaphylactic shock and without an epipen administered in minutes they will die.
There are definitely questions of how to best inform consumers that have severe food allergies. But I’ve been really underwhelmed with the dialog here on this.
It would be lovely if HN could keep in mind that for some people, sesame is a life-threatening ingredient. And those people would also like to safely buy bread.
Please excuse my skepticism, I am asking this out of a genuine desire to become better informed: how can you possibly know this? Unless you happened to have an epi-pen handy the first time your kid ever ate a sesame seed, which seems unlikely, then if this were true would not your kid have died then and there?
There are kits now with allergens that you can feed your kid to test for this kind of thing[0]. The idea is that you have them eat it in the parking lot of a hospital and see what happens.
[0]https://readysetfood.com/products/stage-1-2-bottle-mix-in
OK, but surely not everyone does this?
Here's the thing: if there really are kids out there who will drop dead within minutes of eating a sesame seed, surely some of them will discover this the hard way, i.e. by accidentally consuming a sesame seed and dying. But not once have I ever heard a news report about a kid dying this way, and I can't find any data on how many people die this way. I also can't imagine any reliable way that one could possibly learn that your allergy is so severe that a sesame seed will kill you without having at least some people actually die.
All this leads me to suspect that the belief that sesame seeds are potentially deadly in small doses might not be solidly grounded in facts.
Actually, we can estimate odds even with zero deaths.
The thing is regardless of the trigger anaphylaxis is anaphylaxis. The severity differs, the mechanism is the same. We can see the distribution of reactions and estimate the number that will be lethal even if we have no examples.
(And I rather suspect that a fair number of the lethal cases don't get diagnosed. I don't believe autopsy will reveal what set it off unless the contaminant is obvious.)
Good question.
The idea that coming into contact with a seed could kill you seems insane and terrible. Yet where are all the people dying of this? Is the implication that our prevention is so good we are somehow avoiding it? I'm also skeptical.
I'm not denying that it exists, but common knowledge (you literally can't eat peanut butter at school) indicates it's so common. How could this be?
The solution is to stock epipens everywhere.
> Yet where are all the people dying of this?
Based on this metastudy titled Epidemiology of anaphylaxis in Europe, they found the prognosis was:
> Case fatality rates were noted in three studies at 0.000002%, 0.00009%, and 0.0001%.
That's among all cases of anaphylaxis, so the answer is "they are almost nonexistent". It's not even a rounding error. Something on the order of a few dozen people per year for a country the size of the UK and from what I can tell, most of those are due to administration of IV medication where the allergy was previously unknown and much more severe.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/all.12272
I think part of the confusion is that food anaphylaxis isn't automatic death sentence in all cases, but the risk is that it could be. I have a peanut allergy and carry an epipen. I've been exposed ~5 times in my life but it never was severe enough to deploy it, and instead took benadryl and closely monitored it with epipen in hand and 911 on speed dial. I also know people who eat their allergen occasionally because they just get hives and it's worth it as a treat, and I know people who had severe asthma in minutes after a cross-contamination and needed the epi.
It's just game theory. It's like asking how many metaphorical empty barrels do you want to add to your Russian roulette revolver before you are willing to risk it, the reward being basically "ordinary food". Oh and the risk can suddenly one day go from just causing hives to severe anaphylaxis at a much smaller dose.
Most people who learn of a sensitivity (I learned in elementary school after breaking out in hives from doing art involving peanut shells, the horror to think this is something schools just did!) just don't want to know that badly how dire their allergy is and assume it's life threatening, because it's not worth it to be cavalier.
I can’t answer for sesame, but my kid has an allergy to a specific nut, that we discovered after mum picked baby up after handling said nut, leaving bright red welts on their little body. No ingestion required.
Subsequently, immunology department, skin prick tests to identify the specific culprit, “risk of anaphylaxis” posters, and an Epipen - with risk factor based on the size of the reaction, in millimeters, to the skin prick test.
Thanks.
Yep: instead of a bunch of downvotes, that was exactly the right kind of response to your question. Those of us who don't have these kinds of allergies (or kids with them) would have no clue about this kind of thing, and that response summed it all up very well.
With some allergies, they become more acute on subsequent exposures. Think first time you break out in welts, second time you have a hard time breathing, third time you die.
It’s usually the second exposure that causes the reaction.
There are plenty of anecdotes of close calls. EMTs carry epipens for this reason. And occasionally it’s tragic when one is not administered in time.
But ingestion is not the only way to learn that you have a severe allergy. Skin contact with the allergen with usually result in bad hives. When this happens with a child, it’s scary and tends to result in an appointment with an allergist, who can assess the severity with skin tests and blood draws.
I had an epipen on-hand when my child ate hummus the second time, and started going into anaphylactic shock. They had had a bad hive reaction to spilled milk, so we had already seen the allergist for milk allergies, which were severe enough to warrant an epipen.
It was a terrifying event, and I am very thankful that we had the epipen and that my child did not have a second wave reaction.
No, you don't have a right to buy bread in your situation. Take responsibility, assume labels lie, and bake all the bread yourself.
If we’re starting going down this path, what if the flour also lie and mix in an unknown quantity of sesame? Should families have to devolve into living in a feudal pocket society?
I think it’s fair for the regulator to be hard on lying on food labels. That seems like a rather low bar for a functional modern society. As consumers, we can also ask companies to provide additional services. There’s nothing irresponsible or entitled in politely asking for accommodation from providers or empathy from peers.
And unless there’s an edit that I’m missing, the person you’re responding to explicitly expressed a desire rather than tried to claim a right.
I would argue that they have the _right_ to buy bread, but they also have the _responsibility_ to ensure that their child does not eat affected (or possibly-affected) bread.
These labels shift the responsibility. And that is a responsibility that the companies making bread just are not willing to take.
From your perspective, has this shift reduced the number of options you’re comfortable feeding to your allergic child?
I guess what I’m asking is, was the previous situation (label indicating the mere possibility of cross-contamination) enough of a risk that you avoided those foods, before this labeling shift?
And has the availability changed post-regulation as far as brands or bakeries that lean in to being conscientious about this risk?
From my perspective, it’s been a mixed bag.
On the one hand, sesame is clearly listed on major brands so we can buy bread with more confidence. Before, there was always some hesitation when shopping with unknown brands. Even known brands can change formulations, which could make shopping feel very uncomfortable.
On the other hand, some brands have started intentionally adding sesame. That sucks. But it may also indicate that a real cross contamination risk has always existed.
It’s important to note that not all brands add sesame, and that not all store brands add sesame. So it hasn’t meaningfully reduced our choices. And I do hope that brands intentionally adding sesame will reconsider at some point.
And how does this farce of a rule help you child? Not at all!
You think that somehow this will make sesame-free bread. Nope, that's too expensive. They responded to the FDA's garbage by throwing a pinch of sesame in. Apparently some manufacturers didn't manage to throw enough in, or perhaps the detect threshold isn't sensitive enough. Throw that pinch of sesame into enough bread and it might not be detected even though it's there.
If there was an adequate market for sesame-free bread you would already see it. Nothing is stopping a manufacturer from opening a sesame-free bread factory--that is, nothing but a lack of demand.
Indeed and pretty disingenuous from the bakeries. Mislabelling as containing allergens when it does not can lead to a false sense of security or comfort in consumers. In that they may potentially consume an item and discover that it is labelled for the allergen, and subsequently assume that the lack of a reaction indicates tolerance. Potentially, leading them to consume accurately labelled products expecting the same non-reaction
If I'm understanding you correctly, the concern is that someone who has e.g. a peanut allergy will eat product A which is labeled as containing peanuts despite not having any, and then decide they must not be allergic so they can eat product B which is also labeled as containing peanuts but actually has them, and have a bad outcome?
This seems a stretch. If the person is eating food labeled as containing an allergen, do we really care whether it is product A or B that produces the bad outcome?
Disagree. There's a concept of people "growing out of allergies". I think it's at least plausible someone could eat product A without checking the label, then subsequently read the label and assume "well I must have grown out of that allergy" and hence proceed to eat product B.
Allergies depend on the dose so I don’t think most people would think like this.
Usually those are labeled as "may contain traces of....".
Yeah, and that is just as bad as "contains... " for people that have severe allergies.
The trend for most companies is just to put "may contain traces... " or "manufactured in a facility that also processes... " which will prevent me from buying from those manufacturers.
That's the intended objective. They don't want you buying the food if there's a potential risk you're going to later sue them if whatever minuscule probability of a contamination event does in fact happen to occur.
They have judged that as a market segment, the revenue they can get from selling guaranteed sesame free products is less than the cost of producing it. Other manufacturers may decide it's worth it if they price their bread higher, and then the issue becomes whether you are prepared to pay the price they are asking to cover the increase costs.
Remember at the end of the day, what you eat is a choice. There's no reason why you have to eat bread, but even if you choose to eat it, making the choice to buy more expensive hand-made bread rather than the ultra-processed mass-produced stuff is usually much better for your body in ways other than just not containing sesame.
I know its easy to blame the manufacturers but I don't believe they are entirely at fault here. Its not so much the size alone but that in these facilities they are not being cleaned after every run. Certainly the products that spoil are getting sanitize appropriately (eggs, dairy etc) but uncooked grains I suspect have a much larger time line for cleaning.
Lot of these things are dry ingredients. So they do not even need same level of standards as anything wet. They keep well enough and earlier in manufacturing chain things are much worse. Just think all of the places your average wheat grain go trough from field to finally being baked... Many parts do not have the strictest standards of steam cleaned stainless steel...
Pre-baked grain is not handled with those standards
That's really not true. In both ways, too. It's not realistic.
In the specific case of gluten-free vs normal flour, you might have a clean, safe kitchen but flour flies everywhere and it doesn't take much. The solution for a gluten-free kitchen is to only use gluten free products. I know of a restaurant that offers both gluten free and plain pizza crust and people who need to should know what that means: they try but it's not.
It's also not realistic as to "safely eating off surfaces". That's the goal and that's what test kits test for - but that's the point: the test kits are there because it's hard to achieve (and excess will result in contamination from cleaning products.)
This is the same issue as Prop 65, and while we can all say "oh the law is bad" the real problem is _corporations are lazy_.
Instead of making sure their products are safe, they just say everything is unsafe, because they know consumers will become numb to it.
Our food shouldn't contain allergens, and our computer mice shouldn't give us cancer, but instead of taking the time to make sure of that, companies just tell us the products are dangerous, because they know we don't really have a choice.
They have the money and the capability, but they choose profit over consumer safety, and that's THEIR sin, not ours.
I don’t know what the margins on bread are, but I would bet that they are tiny since this is a competitive market.
Meaning that this kind of medical-lab-style cross contamination protocol will either raise the cost of the product or reduce the variety and choice.
If the result is a safer population, why wouldn't we want this?
There's an anecdote that an AI was asked to make trains safer, and it decided that the trains should never leave the station.
Quality of life involves some risk. IE, you need to exercise, but you might injure yourself doing it.
Remove the top and bottom stairs.
Would you like a law that says everyone must wear a helmet when going outside?
The best way to a safer population is making cars illegal. So many deaths.
Because if you can't afford "safe" bread, your only choice is very unsafe one. This scenario have been played out many times, when hyper safety prices people - usually the most vulnerable - out of the market and they have to seek poorly regulated unsafe grey or black market alternatives.
I worked in two commercial bakeries: Angel and Berman in Jerusalem. The first mostly makes sandwich bread, the other one mostly makes pastry.
This will be probably relevant to answering your question: if you want to realistically prevent cross-contamination, you will need separate set of everything, that is, a separate room with mixing bowls, separate ovens, and, well... the same employees won't be going between those two rooms, so, you need to hire more people to man more equipment.
I was hired into both of these bakeries as a non-skilled labor who was paid minimum hourly wage. Baking bread isn't a particularly luxurious business. It's out there with agriculture, where margin of profit is very low, and your only hope is scale. Also, you cannot really increase bread consumption by baking more bread. The market is easily saturated. So, by forcing a bakery to, essentially, split in two, hire extra workers and install extra equipment, while in the end they'd not be able to sell more product is going to be very expensive. Maybe not even affordable.
Now, consider that a very small minority of people buying bread care for it not being accidentally contaminated with sesame seeds, and your non-allergic bread will either have to cost ten times more than normal, or it won't be made at all. Needless to say that people with allergies will, likely, not want to buy overpriced bread. They might just not eat bread at all, if that's so dangerous.
Because it doesn't necessarily result in a safer population. This is software engineering par for the course. Just because you want some software to have some feature doesn't mean that the other requirements and/or reality will cooperate and give you a desirable outcome.
For example, coral snake antivenom. For quite a while the US only had a single coral snake antivenom on the market because it was made by a company that was grandfathered in. The new(ish) FDA rules made developing a new coral snake antivenom not something anyone wanted to do.
So of course the one existing vendor when out of business.
Last I heard (around 2022) people were trying to come up with a new antivenom but thus far have been unsuccessful.
Prescribing that things be safer doesn't force reality to conform and we have examples of this occurring.
... because at some point, the gains in safety are infinitesimal and the reductions in quality of life are large.
Well they're usually called crusts for starters.
Bravo
These things are not comparable. While adding sesame to everything to circumvent a law is certainly not fair, it is a reasonable ingredient to some products (whereas mice that give us cancer is, at the very least, not a goal). I like sesame buns! And, for young children, it's actually quite important to expose them to a range of allergens because shielding them makes them much more likely to develop allergies.
I’m European, and have been living in the US for a number of years and in Europe before that. It’s like some alternate reality here in the US, where peanuts, bread, and shrimp are out to kill a large part of the population. The article says they estimate 33M people in US to have food allergies which sounds insane to me.
I fully agree on exposure to these allergens when young. Have your child eat wide variety of foods, have them play out in the open and get dirty, have them play with animals, wash hands and keep clean but not to the point of sterility, etc.
One personal anecdote - when I was a few years old I apparently started having a lot of asthma-like coughing symptoms. We got a German shepherd, whom I would then play with, hug a lot, and sleep. My symptoms went away pretty quickly.
Similarly, my parents made sure I eat normal meals and not a ‘child’ diet. Eg I was never allowed to order from a ‘kids menu’. At home, salmon or shrimp for dinner and I don’t want it as a young child? Too bad, that’s dinner, eat that or go hungry (and of course I ended up eating and now love many cuisines and allergic to nothing).
It seems like a cultural difference, that in America, corporations are trying to comply with the laws in the most malicious ways, and most customers get angry about the laws rather than about the corporations. Which of course, removes any incentive for the corporations not to act obnoxiously.
Sometimes it doesn't even seem to make sense. For example, one might think naively, that if a website reacts to the law by throwing tantrum and displaying the most annoying dialog ever invented (which by the way actually isn't GDPR compliant), they would just hurt themselves, because their readers would move to different websites. Yet somehow they don't, and other website adopt the same annoying dialog. I am confused, because this isn't how free market was supposed to work.
Could you list the allergens, please? No we won't, because f--- you!
Well, now you have to list the allergens, or you get punished. Okay, so we will list all allergens in the world, including the ones our products don't contain, because f--- you!
Then we update the law so that you also get punished for listing made up allergens. Okay, so we will add as many allergens as we can to all our products, because f--- you!
Always choosing the most aggressive way to comply with the letter of the law while going completely against the spirit.
Meanwhile, in the deep jungles of Eastern Europe where most people laugh at the very idea of a law, if a product contains an allergen, the producers write "this product contains this allergen"; if the product does not contain the allergen, they write "does not contain this allergen"; and if they are not sure, they write "this product may contain this allergen". Sometimes with an explanation like "we are not adding it on purpose, but we process the allergen for some other products in the same factory, so maybe some small amounts accidentally get there".
People should travel a lot, to learn that things that are considered impossible at one place are often considered trivial at some other place.
EDIT:
Half of the comments in this thread is like "stupid law, this is what you get for making laws, clearly the lawmakers never heard about unintended consequences", and the other half is like "in my country (different countries in different comments) this problem does not exist, producers simply label their products honestly".
I’m a minority on this most likely but if a website does this, I close it, unless my life depends on it which it rarely does. The same if a website has so many ads that it blocks the content and I don’t have adblock. Life is too short for these games.
And why do you assume this is dishonest labeling?
The problem is with possible cross-contamination. For some reason the FDA has gone stupid about what was the accepted practice that the label listed other standard allergens processed in the same facility. It worked. If hitting one of your problems could kill you you didn't touch anything with a cross contamination risk. If hitting a problem was simply an unpleasant time then you went ahead.
Companies originally reacted to the FDA insanity by deliberately adding trace amounts of the maybe items so it definitely contained (who benefits? Nobody!), I don't know the trigger for this latest bit of trouble.
Shawn Woods... now my hero youtuber!
What does this mean?
Mousetrap Mondays.. I am afraid of cancer causing mice.
That doesn't really answer my question, but it doesn't sound like it has much to do with my comment.
If the law doesn’t take into account human and corporate behavior, it’s not a good law. It may ultimately be the corporation’s “fault” but that doesn’t change the fact that the law created perverse incentives.
I hear the same argument for the GDPR laws that have resulted in annoying cookie banners everywhere. Sure, it’s technically the website owner’s fault for spying and adding a shitty banner, but… those banners didn’t exist until the law was created.
We need better laws that more wholly account for human behavior.
GDPR is the dumbest recent law I can think of. Even if a website has no intent to track users, it's way too hard (aka expensive) to tell if you're compliant without slapping on a banner.
How hard is it to figure out whether you place cookies on other people's computers or you don't? Even if you can't read your own source code, you could simply install a new browser, visit your website, and then check the cookies on that browser. I don't think it's GDPR that is dumb.
Cookies alone don't make you non-compliant, it's what you (or anything embedded on your site) do with them. You can also be non-compliant without cookies, but that's not fixable with a banner.
And the EU doesn't jump straight to the maximum penalty and gives you plenty of warnings to sort it out if you accidentally don't comply in a subtle way. If it's noncompliant in a subtle way that doesn't actually cause a problem they certain won't even notice.
Look how blatantly Apple ignored the DMA and how long it's taken the EU to pursue real enforcement action. It seems clear: there is no need to *fear* EU penalties unless you are dead set on noncompliance. Honest mistakes don't bring down businesses due to GDPR.
The reality is any web analytics will make you non-compliant.
The politicians writing the law were likely unaware (or ignored) the Cobra Effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect#The_original_cobr...
The problem with Prop 65 is that we've delegated plaintiff's attorneys to conduct private enforcement actions. Also that the law requires a warning, but doesn't require an explanation of what the material is, what part of the product contains it, or how you are likely to get exposed to it.
As I mentioned elsewhere on this discussion, this is why pure cotton patches now come with Prop 65 warnings (if you might use them to clean a rifle...)
Rag on corporations all you want, but Prop 65 is a terrible law.
it's almost like if corporations could pay politicians to turn good laws into garbage laws, uh?
The numbering scheme was a hint: there were no politicians involved with a ballot initiative. This is what demagoguery combined with direct democracy get you.
good point, butpropositions don't get created in a vacuum
Every protein is allergenic to somebody, and even some non-proteins are allergenic (e.g., they are small molecules that can get inside a somatic protein, which changes the somatic protein's shape, which makes the somatic protein allergenic).
Disagree. There are proteins that if you're allergic to them your body will turn on itself. You'll be dead and no longer care what you're allergic to.
Replace "protein" with "non-self protein", then, or "any protein in food".
In market terms: "corporations try to be capital-efficient because they are competing with each other over price-sensitive consumers."
TBF laziness is the natural order to the universe. Ain't nothin doin more than it has to.
Yeah, but corporations are paid lots of money to not be lazy.
You can pry my gluten-laden, peanut-oil containing, dairy-filled pizza from my cold dead hands!
(The problem isn't allergens, many of which are delicious. The problem is not correctly labeling allergens - I think that's the point you wanted to make at least!)
I have a food allergy (gluten, celiacs).
It’s ridiculous to make everything allergen free. It’s also gross, I hate those products that I dubbed “everything free” that are free from the top N allergens.
They have a place in the market, but they aren’t that good
But we knew that already. The people coming up with the rules must take that into account otherwise you get prop 65 warnings and cookie banners everywhere.
Have computer mice ever caused cancer or isnthat hyperbole
But one person's allergens are another's tasty ingredients. I love my sesame bagels. I don't even know what food would remain if you banned all the allergens. Tapioca powder with beef flavors?
Sesame is one thing. It's delicious but probably not a major subsistence food for anyone. Chinese restaurants would miss their sesame oils though.
Next, it's hard enough to ban fish and shellfish. Many subcultures depend on them, especially near major bodies of water.
No tree nuts or peanuts? A lunch staple gone for millions. Jam will be so lonely.
Or wheat. Or milk. Or egg. Or soy? That's the end of breakfast and bakeries and dessert, I guess. The vegetarians will get awfully hungry.
I think at that point, the only thing left to eat would be the regulators themselves. Karma's never been so tasty...
And that's why we have insane laws. Because of people saying stuff like "our food shouldn't contain allergens" and spewing vague nonsense about evil profitmongers, while enabling demagogues who promote insane schemes built to inflame ignoramuses, like prop 65.
Virtually anything can be an allergen, and a lot of chemicals, given enough concentration and bad luck, can lead to cancer or birth defects. So ignoramuses demand laws that mark any chemical that can be reasonably thought of harming anyone in any circumstance possible in theory, and then blame corporations when the outcome is disastrous.
Corporations are optimized to make money; doing the non-lazy thing here costs money.
This is the same issue as 65--setting an unreasonable standard and then blaming business when the standard isn't met.
It used to be that when companies produced products in the same facilities that produced products on the allergen list they would label them as "may contain". Not something they added, but not something they promised it did not inadvertently contain.
A company is free to produce products in facilities that do not also process the standard allergens but to do so will be more expensive and few people want to pay the extra cost for something which is of no benefit to them. If you're not allergic to sesame it does not matter if there's a bit of sesame in your food.
The whole food labeling thing is being taken to excess. The FDA is going bonkers about what companies are or are not adding, while there's no requirement for documenting what impurities might remain. As far as I'm concerned the FDA can take their labeling rules and shove them where the sun doesn't shine.
Instead, put a QR code. It comes up with a page that lists what they intentionally added (no generic categories--I know I don't have issues with all "artificial flavors" but I do with some. And "natural flavors" comes in a close second), what cross-contamination is likely and for any refined product what the raw material was that it came from and to what degree it was purified. In addition to the human-readable form it also contains a standardized representation meant for machine parsing. Scan the code with an appropriate app and it flags anything on the list that it has been told to flag.
They are saying to play by the spirit of the rules instead of working the ref on the letter of the rules.
But businesses could give a fuck about anything other than their current margin.
Putting it another way, the FDA put forth a regulation intended to make the lives of a certain group of people better, and the response was to figure out how to not bother with that.
If producer A just puts sesame in their products, and that means they can undercut producer B who spends the money to comply with the spirit of the regulation, producer B goes out of business because their expenses are higher.
So what do you expect would happen? Consumers like cheaper rather than higher prices, this isn't a new thing.
Pass regulations that prevent producer A from undercutting producer B?
How? Forbid sesame seeds for everybody?
Not a bad idea actually. If some people can die of sesame seeds, the rest of us can manage without, sprinkle the seeds on our bread at home or bake our own bread if we can't live without sesame seeds.
Apply that logic to more common allergens like wheat, eggs, milk, or soy.
Why? The cases are very different regarding different allergies, allergens and product categories.
I don't think they're that different. The muffin I had for breakfast contained wheat, milk, egg, and sesame oil. Salicylate intolerance is at least as common as sesame allergy, so let's toss in the blueberries, too.
If you're going to do that, then you need to ban all prepared foods from having any kind of allergen, because someone might die of it.
That means bread made with wheat is now illegal, because some people are highly allergic to gluten. If you don't want gluten-free bread, you'll have to make it yourself.
Also, you can't have any food with shrimp or shellfish. Peanut butter is now illegal (but you can make it yourself). Pistachio ice cream is illegal.
Not only is wheat bread illegal, but any baked good can't be made with milk either, since some young children are allergic. And you can't substitute soy milk either, since some babies are allergic to that too. Baked goods in your proposed future sound really awful, quite frankly.
Gluten-free baked goods made with potato flour are illegal too, since some people are allergic to potatoes. So french fries are also illegal.
Some other things you won't be able to have either in a pre-made food, or at a restaurant: - celery - carrots - pumpkin - mushroom - onion - garlic - bell pepper - fish (so apparently you want to ban sushi restaurants too)
So I'm curious, in your vision of the future, what exactly do people eat? Beef and lettuce for every meal?
Nice collection of straw-men, but elsewhere in discussion it has been made clear how the situation with sesame in bread is not comparable to your cases.
If A can die from sesame seeds and B can't and the A-to-B ratio is something like 1:1e+6, doesn't it make more sense for A to bake their own bread instead?
"Bake your own bread" - does not solve the situation when you want to travel, eat out etc.
Most bread types don't contain sesame seeds so why let the sesame seeds contaminate them and cause life-and-death situations?
Proposed legislation: allow large-scale production and sales of sesame seed bread only if you produce and sell more sesame-free bread.
Do you have any idea about how expensive it is to audit your entire supply chain to ensure that it is 100% free of allergens? You'd essentially put that cost onto everyone for the benefit of a small minority. I'm sure you can see why that is a political non-starter.
You aren’t wrong, but it isn’t workable. Regulations can become very specific to prevent loopholes in compliance, but to the point that the government is just driving the business and it might well be socialized.
Making food more expensive might have consequences.
Like how we passed regulation to get to this point? And we will pass regulation for the new loophole created by this regulation, right? And we'll keep doing this, as the overhead to comply with regulation gradually increases and prevents small competitors from entering the market as they cannot afford to meet the regulation overhead? Of course, we will address this problem with new regulation.
I totally expect people to be assholes about it, don't worry. That's what I'm getting at, people are assholes.
Should we be proud and happy about that? Apparently.
You have a legal duty to not poison people by telling them there aren't allergens in their food when there might be. You don't have a legal duty to create a hypoallergenic product line. Regulations exist to protect your rights, not make your shopping experience more convenient.
Oh, great, people are living up to their legal duty, I'm so proud of them and totally won't think they don't give a shit about other people if they do the cheapest thing that satisfies the regulation.
People are going to buy the cheapest option that satisfies the regulation. If giving shit about other people means systematically buying more expensive options they won't give any.
People can buy whatever they want, it's the producers changing their recipe or labeling that demonstrates not giving a shit.
They aren't changing their recipe to make their product better or cheaper, they change it so that they don't have to deal with compliance. That's the not giving a shit.
Right, the breadmakers don't give a shit about this. That's ok, the breadbuyers like me don't give a shit either.
They are changing the recipe in order to keep the product cheap, because compliance on this would be really fucking expensive, requiring completely and permanently separate facilities for products that contain each specific allergens and those that don't.
This is food. It has so many more quality dimensions than price point and regulation compliance.
If they did start adding small amounts of the ingredients in question, admiration for their malicious compliance would make me more likely to buy their product, especially if it's also the cheapest. They have two options: acknowledge that perfect isolation is an unrealistic goal for their facility, or put aside some money for a legal fund for when their unlabeled food eventually kills someone.
What's an allergen? Or, more interestingly, what isn't an allergen?
This feels like it’s going the way of prop 65. To be on the safe side, everything gets the label, thus making the label pointless -it no longer helps differentiating things.
I don’t think prop 65 is super useful but I don’t get why people think it’s meaningless.
I’ve definitely seen prop 65 on things that made me pause because nothing about the object (like a food bowl) should give me cancer and often I won’t buy it.
That's kind of the point. There very well could be nothing wrong with that food bowl and someone slapped a label on it for no reason at all. Literally without meaning.
Except because of prop 65, I learned that some bowls actually do have some lead in them due to their glazes or coloring…
And that the label was probably correct.
You say probably and I guess that guesswork is what it comes down to.
I think that p65 warnings are only slightly better than random in terms of identifying risky objects. I would guess they are only applied half the time if the item contains a known chemical, and half the time it contains a chemical, it has no label.
Also, the threshold is so poor, you have no idea if an item is actually dangerous even if it is correctly used.
Last, it is pretty unclear what they mean. When I walk into a p65 building, does that mean I am taking a real risk, or that I shouldn't eat the building because the paint contains lead. Same for the bowl.
But isn’t that the case with everything? You can’t take anything at face value and never in history have you ever been able to.
When you read a news article, you have to know about the publication before you can contextualize the article.
When you read a restaurant movie review or rating, you have to know what the general average is and trends of the source before you can interpret the rating.
When you read about some food being healthy, you need to know if they mean nutrient wise or calorie wise to contextualize “healthy.”
Just reading hackernews, you know how people on here swing about different issues so when an article comes up on one of those issues, you know how the comment section may perceive the issue.
To me, prop 65 is just another thing that provides a signal if you want to contextualize it.
Sure, nothing is 100% trustworthy, but that doesn't mean everything is equal either. What I am saying is that p65 are an especially bad and noisy signal. The definitions provided by the state are garbage to start with, and then the utilization by private parties is especially inconsistent, with a large number (perhaps even a majority), using the label when they shouldn't or failing to use it when they should.
But most bowls don't have P65 labels. I only see those at very cheap places like Daiso. What gives?
That's kind of the point.Daiso may just have a corporate policy of slapping a label on all of their import products for Customs inspection. That doesn't mean it's any more dangerous than the $100 Bowl bought at farmers market or West Elm with a leaded glaze but no warning.
My point is that both over and under use of the labels is so rampant that you can put very little trust in them.
How are real businesses selling bowls with leaded glaze and no warning? Not referring to a farmer's market but something like West Elm. If they're getting away with this, then yeah, the law is broken. If Daiso is just over-using the label, maybe they shouldn't do that if they want to sell bowls.
No, I see canned peaches with a P65 label and I see canned peaches without them. Same for fried snacks.
Are those labels based on periodic random testing or based on risk avoidance?
What proportion of these labels are false positives?
Main threats I see are lead and cadmium in some foods from China, also high levels of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide
in some foods.
We dumped lead all over the environment. You can basically assume anything grown has lead, the only question being how much. Likewise, mercury. In some areas there's a lot of arsenic.
Most everything high on the periodic table is nasty. The few that we willingly associate with are because they are non-reactive enough to not actually pose a threat even if in theory they're harmful. (Consider the use of barium to image the digestive system. They use a form of it that's sufficiently insoluble that you don't get poisoned.)
There is no penalty for over-labeling. Maybe some lost sales. Not a big deal.
But there is a huge potentially downside for under-labeling e.g. people dying. There is an ethic issue here as well even if we ignore money.
Also, the production pipeline is not 100% perfect. They produce millions of items each year. Even with 0.001% defect / cross-contamination, it could be troublesome.
More importantly, the exec who decides to under-label might end up in jail if people die from their decision.
Basic game theory really. If I'm an exec who is paid millions of dollars a year, I wouldn't risk it. Big deal if I earn a little less.
Unless FDA tips the scale and provides some guarantees, this warning means nothing. If FDA really wants to punish for over-labeling, I'd start adding a really small allergen, so the warning becomes accurate lol.
The basic problem here is that there are three categories of people:
Those for whom X is fine/those for whom X is undesirable/those for whom X is deadly.
We used to have three categories:
contains/may contain/doesn't contain.
Draw this as a 3x3 matrix.
Those for whom X is fine don't care, they can eat any row.
Those for whom X is undesirable generally do not care about cross contamination. The risk * loss is low enough not to be important.
Those for whom X is deadly will not eat from the may contain category.
The FDA appears to have declared war on the may contain category. Who wins? Nobody. Who loses? Those for whom X is undesirable who are now no longer able to know that the item is probably fine.
I think they are operating under the fantasy that removing may contains means companies will ensure it isn't there, but that's an expensive endeavor that the marketplace simply doesn't call for.
That's sort of the boogeyman way it's been interpreted but the other way of looking at it is that those items really are carcinogenic. And it's not the 'give a rate 100x the amount anybody could possibly digest and of course they get cancer' trope either - these really are substances that have cancer risk and they're very common in modern life.
But they're not all over the place like you would think from the 65 nonsense.
The vast majority of cases are trace levels of low risk materials. Never mind that in most cases you're facing a lot more risk from natural materials.
That's how it already apparently is, and this is supposed to mitigate that.
The safest thing to do is to actually add the allergens to some degree and then warn people.
The article says that is precisely what they did and the FDA found that it violated the spirit of the law.
No where in the article does it say allergens were added. If they were then the labelling could not possibly "misbranded".
From the article:
So yes, to avoid having to prevent cross-contamination, they started intentionally introducing trace amounts of allergens.
That seems like the actions of a psychopath to be honest. I struggle to comprehend that someone would care that much about profit that they would intentionally introduce a "contamination", rather than ensuring a correct labeling and clean environment, making their product safe to consume to those with certain allergies.
Ensuring a "correct labeling and clean environment" is really expensive. I mean, really expensive. It's not going to be practical.
I quite frankly question if that is true. A family member is allergic to eggs, as in "he will die if eggs have been near food he consumes". Local bakers have absolutely no issue producing cakes and bread for events when he asks and the prices difference is negligible.
Because they aren't running a production line. And eggs don't make dust.
Produce an item, clean your utensils before the next time. Minimal cross-contamination issues.
A production line processing sesame will create a certain amount of sesame dust. Ensuring that dust gets nowhere near other production equipment is expensive.
It has nothing to do with profit, as it'll just increase the price of the goods to the consumer.
and lose profit. If they spend the money to run a safe production line and pass the cost on the the consumer they will loose market share to the company that runs an unsafe production line & keeps the price the same. It's also especially expensive if the do it quickly. It's been a few years, so fortunately some of them have actually gotten around to updating their production lines by now. T hey just did it slowly in the cheapest, least disruptive way possible.
Sociopathy is probably a more accurate diagnosis than psychopathy. And corporations are inherently sociopathic. By definition their primary motive is profit and there are often strong incentives on those in charge to ignore ethical considerations. It's probably the #1 reason we have consumer protection, and environmental protection laws.
Ah genuniely missed that line, though as the FDA states is legal.
Or admit the law that was being applied was actually 'the law of unintended consequences'.
The class of the anointed will never be able to admit to themselves their hubris.
They should ban unintended consequences, that'll work out fine.
But that’s such a pain in the but for those of us with a mild sesame problem.
If it says “may contain” then I’m fine. If it’s listed as an ingredient then I can’t risk having it.
For people who can’t have any at all you’ve not improved the situation but at the cost of making it significantly worse for people with a mild reaction.
The FDA doesn't allow "may contains" for possible major allergen cross contamination. If the allergen is listed as "may contain" the FDA still requires all of the same costly manufacturing separation practices.
The FDA should either allow "may contains" labels to be used, or create a new category that can be used.
Although by adding small amounts of possible allergens to a bunch of common food items you help reduce the frequency of future generations developing the same allergy. So it's a bit of a mixed bag there.
Safest from a corporate liability perspective, not from an inadvertently killing kids perspective. What you're suggesting is precisely what substantially all brands did with sesame, and it's why my family stopped eating hamburgers and hotdogs for several years...because we were literally unable to buy buns that would reliably not kill my daughter. The bread situation was almost as bad. We eventually found 1 brand available at 1 store and were able to feed her sandwiches once again. Now it wasn't much of a risk for our family because we understand how deadly allergies can be and we read ingredients carefully. But for kids whose parents are less careful, some of them die, particularly when there are zero safe options and you don't know if manufacturers are really adding the allergen or just saying they do for legal reasons(both were common). And it sounds like you may be referring to the common belief & research around early/small dose exposure helping kids avoid/outgrow allergies, but what's often lost in those conversations is that it sometimes works, and sometimes makes the allergies worse or even kills you, and nobody has the faintest clue why or which will happen to you. That's why the research generally includes allergen+medication, because the medication is necessary to avoid accidentally killing some percentage of the patients.
(Non US)
On almost all food labels that I've seen for the last decade or so I've seen disclaimers like "this product is made in a factory that processes $ALLERGEN"
Usually $ALLERGEN is "tree nuts".
Sure, that's the sort of thing that the FDA were complaining about. From TFA:
The "may contain" line is not the part that the FDA takes issues with. From the source complaint:
Emphasis on "Contains", which is a separate line on the packaging from the "may contain" line.
It isn't part of this complaint, however the FDA regulation explicitly says that labeling food with "may contains" is not good enough for major allergen cross contamination, which is why companies added them to the "contains" section, and why some companies are actually mixing allergens into he ingredients so they can legally add them to the contains section. (In this case, the bakery appears to have just added the allergens to the contains section without actually adding them).
The FDA should either 1) Allow the use of "may contains" for major allergen cross contamination. Or) Create a new category, such as "Possible cross contamination" that would be considered good enough. This would remove the incentive to deliberately add allergens while allowing proper labeling.
However, there are some lobbyist groups that want to force companies to use separate factories for any foods that contain major allergens, making those foods cost substantially more than they do now to produce. So the of us without allergens can either eat tasteless sterile food (likely leading to more folks with food allergies do a lack of exposure), or to pay out the wazoo for the privilege of eating normal food.
We have that too.
Same in the UK. For example, it's not uncommon to have food items that are certified as vegan, with a warning that they may contain traces of milk due to cross contamination - for most vegans, this is acceptable.
Which is how it should be. But the FDA isn't allowing that anymore.
(France) "trace of nuts" "may contain accidental presence of nuts" "made in a workshop that processes nuts"
Certain products specifically for allergy sufferers have strange messages such as "non-quantifiable presence of an allergen". A PCR test can detect traces of a product's DNA, but it is impossible to quantify its volume because it is so small, or to trace the source of contamination.
They can't say there aren't any, there's no defined threshold or it's not possible to clearly quantify the quantity.
Right.
Bimbo has not been actually adding the allergen to the product. Presumably, they will start explicitly adding it, so the warning will be proper.
This reminds me of software services that intentionally avoid exceeding their uptime SLOs so they don't set dangerously high expectations.